Parker spoke
about understanding his male privilege and the definition of consent in a
lengthy interview Friday with Ebony magazine in Los Angeles. Earlier this
month, the Hollywood trade press began to run stories about a 1999 rape
allegation made against Parker when he was a student at Penn State University.

Parker was
charged and later acquitted. The accuser killed herself in 2012.

Earlier this
month, he gave two interviews to Variety and Deadline that received much
attention. He told Ebony that in those interviews he “was acting as if I
was the victim, and that’s wrong.”

Parker wrote,
directed and will star in “The Birth of a Nation,” out in October.
The film, about Nat Turner and the slave rebellion, is already generating Oscar
buzz.

“I called a
couple of sisters that (I) know that are in the space that talk about the
feminist movement and toxic masculinity, and just asked questions. What did I
do wrong? Because I was thinking about myself. And what I realized is that I
never took a moment to think about the woman,” he told Ebony he did after
his first pair of interviews. “I didn’t think about her (the accuser)
then, and I didn’t think about her when I was saying those statements, which
was wrong and insensitive.”

Parker said that
he needs to seek information that will make him stronger, “that’ll help me
overcome my toxic masculinity, my male privilege, because that’s something you
never think about.”

When asked if he
thought about the rape case over the last 17 years, he said he “hadn’t
thought about it at all.”

Though Parker was
acquitted, his college roommate and “Birth” collaborator Jean
Celestin was initially found guilty of sexual assault. Celestin appealed and it
was later overturned when the accuser declined to testify for a retrial.

“The Birth
of a Nation” will be released Oct. 7. It had won top prizes at the
Sundance Film Festival.